Ron Miller

Ron Miller is enterprise reporter at TechCrunch. He has been a Freelance Technology Journalist since 1998.

In addition, he is Contributing Editor at EContent Magazine where he writes the Media Redux column and an occasional contributor at Smart Industry, a blog on Industrial Internet of Things.

He helped launch and still runs the blog socmedianews.com. Past regular gigs included CITEworld, DaniWeb, TechTarget, Internet Evolution and FierceContentManagement.

Disclosures:

Ron is currently corporate blogger for Intronis where he writes once weekly on issues related to IT and a weekly feature called The Cloud 5 where he aggregates five links related to the cloud computing. He has contributed to various corporate blogs in the past including Ness, Novell and the IBM Mid-market Blogger Program.

Latest from Ron Miller

A few years ago in an interview with Forbes, Tim O’Reilly famously said, “The Guy With The Most Data Wins.” It seems his statement was prescient, or perhaps organizations took it a bit too seriously and have been collecting as much data as they can ever since.
Yet all of this data gathering comes with a host of ethical, moral and legal issues around ownership and… Read More

When Microsoft announced its wrenching $7.6 billion write-down last week, it was easy to presume that the company was giving up on mobile. At the very least, the financial avalanche sent a strong signal that Windows phone in its current guise has failed in a major way. Read More

Main Street Hub, the Austin-based marketing platform for small business, announced a $25 million Series C equity round today.
The funding, led by Vista Equity Partners, follows a $20 million debt round last February and brings the total raised to $65 million.
Main Street Hub wants to be the one-stop marketing arm for small business, giving the mom and pop store access to the power of the… Read More

It was just a year ago today, that Apple and IBM shocked the world when they announced a partnership. Apple, the consummate consumer company was teaming up with IBM, the quintessential buttoned-down corporation with an enterprise pedigree.
It seemed to be the oddest of odd couples, but one year in and 32 apps later, the partnership seems to be flourishing and giving both companies… Read More

What do you for an encore after you founded and sold OKCupid? Well you tackle public-key encryption, of course.
Keybase was the result, and the company announced a $10.8 million Series A investment today led by Andreessen Horowitz.
While it may not seem like a logical next move, co-founders Max Krohn and Chris Coyne were considering what to do after they left OKCupid in 2013. They decided… Read More

DataCamp wants to teach data science skills to a generation of people, and it got a million in seed money to continue developing its online data-science learning platform.
The round was led by Chris Lynch at Accomplice, an early stage venture capital firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company had raised $300,000 in seed money previously
DataCamp is not unlike coding bootcamps such… Read More

Workday, the 10 year old company that specializes in finance and human resources software in the cloud, announced a new program today called Workday Ventures, an investment arm focusing on startups with a machine learning bent.
It intends to fund 10-12 companies this year with executives Dan Beck, senior vice president of technology products and Adeyemi ‘Ade’ Ajao, vice… Read More

Rescale, a company that has developed a Platform as a Service for high-end computer simulations, announced a $6.4 million investment from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley investing circles.
Among the people backing Rescale are Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Peter Thiel and many others.
What type of company warrants this kind… Read More

Today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Orlando, Microsoft announced the Cortana Analytics Suite. It takes the company’s machine learning, big data and analytics products and packages them together in one huge, monolithic suite.
Microsoft has put together the suite with the hope of providing a one-stop, big data and analytics solution for enterprise customers.
“Our goal was… Read More

If you need proof that security is a red hot market these days, how about this morning’s announcement that cybersecurity company CrowdStrike landed a $100 million Series C investment round?
The round was led by Google Capital with Rackspace, which happens to be one of the company’s customers also investing. Existing investors Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated. Read More

In a blog post published this morning, Microsoft’s Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who is in charge of Azure ML, announced the public preview of the Azure Data Catalog, an in-house tool to facilitate discovery of a company’s data sources.
Azure ML is Microsoft’s machine learning platform, which was launched last February. As companies create various… Read More

Splunk announced this evening it had purchase Caspida, a Palo Alto startup that uses machine learning techniques to help identify cyber-secruity threats from inside and outside the company, for $190 million. The deal has already closed, the company reported.
Splunk helps companies deal with the onslaught of machine data coming from IT systems using data science techniques and automation to… Read More

Amazon Web Services announced a new product today called Amazon API Gateway, designed to simplify creation and management of APIs.
Today, many companies want to give access to back-end services to other applications through an application programming interface (API). It usually requires a tremendous amount of effort and resources to create, maintain and secure the API and make sure… Read More

Busy sales people want to spend their time interacting with customers, not taking care of administrative work. That’s where PandaDoc comes in, a startup that helps automate creation of quotes, proposals and contracts.
Today it announced a $5 million investment led by Altos Ventures with additional participation from TMT Investments and other unnamed investors. The announcement… Read More

Dynatrace released the latest version of its application performance monitoring (APM) product today, which it hopes will shift the company from pure monitoring into the realm of customer experience.
Although this is a major release with many new features, it centers on the Customer Experience Cockpit, which is effectively a dashboard that lets users see a User Satisfaction Rating along… Read More

PipelineDB, a Y Combinator Winter 2014 graduate, announced the availability of the open source version of its streaming SQL database product today. A commercial version is expected later this year.
The product is an open-source database that runs SQL queries continuously in streams, incrementally storing the results in tables, company co-founder Derek Nelson explained. “[The… Read More

When EMC bought cloud sync and share company, Syncplicity in 2012, it seemed the company was trying to change the way it does business, but three years later it’s selling out to private equity firm, Skyview Capital, perhaps ready to concede that a freemium cloud model doesn’t fit the company culture.
It’s worth noting that EMC will maintain a stake in Syncplicity, but the… Read More

When Bill Veghte, former head of HP Enterprise stepped down last week quite suddenly, nobody knew where he would land. Today we found out as he was announced as the new CEO at SurveyMonkey.
SurveyMonkey board chairman Zander Lurie has been serving as interim CEO since former CEO, Dave Goldberg died suddenly in May while on vacation in Mexico.
In fact, Veghte was a close friend of… Read More

There was a ton of fallout as the Greek economic crisis worsened this week week and the country struggled to come up with answers to its growing predicament.
As Alexia Tsotsis explained in an article on TechCrunch earlier this week:
This week, the Syriza government failed in negotiations to receive a tranche of bailout money in time to make a $1.7 billion IMF payment on June 30th. Instead… Read More

We tend to think of disruption as kind of a passive activity. The determined upstart enters the market and the established business doesn’t give it a second thought. Then ever so slowly before it can even react, the industry suddenly realizes it’s lost control.
In most cases, the incumbent tries the usual tactics, perhaps making a half-hearted effort to change strategies to be… Read More